


the most important three seconds in the imaginary history of cinema

by viviandarkbloom



Category: Last Tango In Halifax
Genre: F/F, Tumblr Prompt, imaginary movies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-17
Updated: 2018-01-17
Packaged: 2019-03-06 02:34:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13401612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viviandarkbloom/pseuds/viviandarkbloom
Summary: The film Gillian describes here is a complete fabrication.Night of the Lepus,however, is the real deal.By combined request of aluckypenny & mazily:kiss prompts 1 & 19.(Not taking any more prompts at the mo, sorry!)





	the most important three seconds in the imaginary history of cinema

**Author's Note:**

> The film Gillian describes here is a complete fabrication. [Night of the Lepus,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0DKTM41r1s) however, is the real deal. 
> 
> By combined request of aluckypenny & mazily: [kiss prompts 1 & 19.](http://the-revisionist.tumblr.com/post/169119359158/fictional-kiss-prompts) (Not taking any more prompts at the mo, sorry!)

 

Not unlike a great musician merging with an instrument, the telly remote has, to Caroline’s strangely aroused dismay, become a mighty extension of Gillian’s hand. She points it with thrilling command, like D’Artagnan facing Cardinal Richelieu in a battle for the soul of France; then throttles it violently while cursing her son and his infernal Xbox, which she believes to be the rightful cause of the nonfunctioning black screen that mocks them. 

“That b-bloody stupid pillock, always messing about with the setup—” Gillian snarls and gives the remote another useless shake, demonstrating the same impatient, childlike rage at insensate objects that Caroline has witnessed in her granddaughter, who delights in twisting and slamming around dolls with unrepentant, rugby-player-on-steroids glee.

As Caroline waits for the temper tantrum to subside, questions as to her romantic suitability with this exquisite maniac once again arise. She notes for perhaps the thousandth time that there is no such thing as the perfect partner and her expectations have always been loftily, unrealistically high whilst at the same time acknowledging that shagging one’s stepsister on the side is perhaps not a personal best and more suited to a troubled but minor headline in _Woman’s Weekly._ So she has opted not to think of Gillian as Gillian per se, but rather My Nice-Smelling Illicit Secret Girlfriend Who Can Change the Oil in my Jeep But if My Mother Finds Out She Will Kill Us Both and Have a Stroke Maybe at the Same Time. It makes for unexpected headaches, complicated secrecy, and increased whiskey consumption, each aspect of the conundrum feeding off of and prompting the other.    

Courtesy of family members who have actual lives, who go places and do things and aren’t grumpily absorbed into demanding, time-consuming jobs, they are alone for an entire weekend. It’s Saturday evening and the day has passed in a happy hedonistic blur of shagging, eating, drinking, and going for a long walk. Over dinner Gillian proposed watching a film afterward and Caroline agreed, thinking that after Round 2 (or 3, she wasn’t certain how to classify those ten minutes in the barn except to acknowledge her culpability in startling a lamb), she was more than sexually sated for the time being and she could endure whatever third-rate monster movie or Tarantino retrospective thrown her way. But while cleaning up Gillian bent over to retrieve a napkin that had fallen on the floor and as far as Caroline’s critical faculties could discern those three seconds of glorious, blue-jeaned ass were a cinematic masterpiece rivaling the complete oeuvre of Hitchcock and Kurosawa and Truffaut and any other pretentious fucker with a fancy name and Caroline decided then and there she really didn’t need to see another movie perhaps for a long time but most certainly, definitely not tonight because with renewed vigor she was now chomping at the erotic bit for Round 3 (or 4).

Alas she finds herself in a tangled sprawl with Gillian on the sofa as a prelude to movie-watching, her chin forlornly propped against Gillian’s upper arm while the latter growls “fuckity fuck fuck fuck” at the remote, and then Caroline arrives at the momentous decision that intervention—in the form of a long, deep, heated kiss—is required. The first time they kissed like that, Gillian dropped trou faster than the closing curtain at the last performance of a _Carrie_ musical revival. So she seizes a handful of plaid shirt, pulling the startled Gillian closer, and kisses her just so. While Gillian makes the same girlish whimpering noise now that she did then, she does not merrily surrender all clothing as her passport to ecstasy and instead breaks off the kiss to glower again at the unresponsive television.

Caroline has never been so deeply disheartened at a display of focused willpower in her entire life.

“I _know_ I DVR’ed this,” Gillian says, arm ramrod straight as she once again thrusts the clicker at the dead screen while furiously jabbing random buttons with her thumb.

Caroline waits for a light saber to come shooting out of the remote. When it doesn’t, she tugs at Gillian’s shirt again, engaging them in another wet, lingering kiss. “What’s it again?” she mutters around the confluence of the kiss.

“It’s a—psychological—suspense—thriller,” Gillian breathes into her mouth.

“So—” Caroline initiates another kiss. “—total—shit—horror—movie.”

“No,” Gillian replies with a kiss of her own. “It’s.” Another kiss. “Not.” This time with an added nip. “It’s more than that.” This time longer, gentler, sweeter. “I want you to see it. It’s really good.”

Caroline shifts tactics and goes for the vulnerable erogenous zone of the ear while slipping a hand under Gillian’s shirt. “What’s it about?”

“About t-this guy, he, he gets stranded in Hungary—”

Caroline puts her moves on hold. “What kind of knobhead gets stranded in Hungary?” Quietly she curses her natural curiosity and advocacy of rational, well-planned behavior, even in fictitious characters from all parts of the world, including Hungary. “There are maps, trains, buses—”  

“People get stranded in Hungary, where is it written that people don’t get stranded in Hungary and I know what you’re up to, _stop trying to undo my bra._ ”

Defeated, Caroline withdraws her hand. “Kissing still all right?”

Gillian pauses before uttering “proceed” in her best Jean-Luc Picard tone.

“Okay,” Caroline mumbles into Gillian’s neck as she brilliantly conducts kissing, nibbling, and licking with the exactitude of a Mozart string quartet, but then thinks maybe it’s not brilliant because she’s not getting any reaction—until she notices Gillian’s breathing has gotten awfully shallow. “So. Idiot stranded in Hungary—“

“H-he meets this mysterious family who live in a castle—”

“Vampires,” Caroline supplies confidently.

“No, not vampires. Don’t be so clichéd.”

“Werewolves.”

“Cliché.”

“Writers for the _Daily Mail_?”

“Fuck sakes, Caz.”

“All right, sorry—so what—?”

“Satanists.”

Abruptly Caroline rears back. “That’s _not_ clichéd?”

“They’re like a cult,” Gillian says haughtily, as if highly organized secretive Satanists somehow merited originality and legitimate respect rather than the garden-variety kind of devil worshippers one might encounter after midnight at Tesco buying candles and snacks and bottles of hot sauce for phony pentagram and animal sacrifice rituals to alarm their elderly and easily freaked-out neighbors. “See, the whole setup, it’s kind of a modern Hungarian version of _The Masque of the Red Death_ except without dwarves or black plague or Vincent Price.”  

“Well I simply cannot commit to a film without dwarves or black plague or Vincent Price, so perhaps we should give this a pass.”

“There’s also a psychedelic mini-musical when the countess marries Satan. They sing ‘Kiss Them for Me’ by Siouxsie and the Banshees, messing with the lyrics—‘it’s all for me/at Satan’s gift registry.’ Wonder they didn’t get sued. Actually, maybe they did. I should google—” Gillian looks longingly at her mobile, which is far away on the coffee table.

Caroline sighs. “You do realize that by tomorrow morning our entire families are going to converge on this house and we probably won’t have another opportunity to be completely alone until Flora and Calamity go to university.”

“Aw bless, I love how optimistic you are. ’Cause you know Calam is going to be a druglord. That’s how she’s going to support me in my dotage.”

“Great, so you’ll have plenty of time in your ‘dotage’ to watch bad horror films.” She tries to pry the remote from Gillian’s hand, an exercise in futility, she knows, recalling a time she tried to reclaim an almost-empty bottle of really excellent cabernet sauvignon from Gillian and discovered that the woman has the iron grip of an Olympic weightlifter. Then the mask of her own stubborn idiocy falls away when she sees a flash of real disappointment on Gillian’s face. “You really want to see this, don’t you?”

“More like—“ Gillian shrugs self-consciously. “I, well, just wanted to share it. Wanted you to see it.”

Caroline’s guilty conscience finally asserts itself. She gives the remote a gentle tug. “May I?”

Curious, Gillian hands it over. Caroline sits up, pops open the back of the remote, pulls batteries out of her pants pocket, quickly inserts them into the empty chamber from whence they came, snaps the cover back into place, and guiltily awaits judgment.  

Gillian’s reaction is, of course, better than any movie, including the imaginary Warholian masterpiece of three seconds of denim-covered ass: Her face encompasses a rollercoaster of reactions beginning with unbridled shock and fury, detouring through astonished admiration and reluctant amusement, and back again to hostile, narrow-eyed territory. “You. Fucking. Evil. Bitch.”

“I’m sorry. Really, I am. Really, really sorry. I was going to make a go of watching a movie, honest, but after dinner you bent over and you know I’m weak—”

“You sex fiend.” Gillian enunciates it with the same puritan precision that Celia employs in saying _lesbian._

“Oh, _I’m_ a sex fiend, Great Slapper of Halifax?”

“Shut up, I so rarely get a chance to be judgmental like this and I’d like to bloody well enjoy it.”

“It reflects very well on you, though. Or on your ass, at the very least.”

“Piss off.” Resolute, Gillian folds her arms; glaring defiantly at the telly screen, she sulks for an agonizingly long minute. “Despite your f-flattery and, and okay, your evilness is _weirdly_ turning me on, we are watching this fucking movie. All right?”

“All right,” Caroline agrees dreamily as she watches Gillian get up and stomp to the kitchen. The things we do for—love? Lust? The perfect ass, the secret girlfriend? At the present moment it’s more than she’s willing to contemplate and so she sets it aside; not out of denial, but rather she realizes that what exists between them should remain safe, thriving until it can withstand the glare and scrutiny of the world at large. At last, and for reasons unknown to her at the moment, she finally sees potential in what they are.

“I might make you watch _Night of the Lepus_ as well,” Gillian threatens from the kitchen.  

“Surely there are more pleasurable ways of punishing me?”

This salacious salvo is ignored. “Shut up, I’m making popcorn.”

Caroline slumps deeper into the sofa, looks at the remote. With a few button presses she’s in the DVR menu and, cheeks burning with pleasure, smiles at what she sees listed there. “Oh ho ho. Somebody has DVR’ed _University Challenge_ for me.”

Gillian slams a pan on the stove. “Who says it’s for you?”

“Who else in this household would watch it?”

“Raff.”

“Don’t lie.”

“Don’t read anything into it.”

“I’m totally reading everything into it,” Caroline trills triumphantly—even though it’s completely wrong to gloat after so much bad behavior on her part. “You are smitten.”

“You are delusional.”

“Mad about me.”

“You’re mad, period.”

“You absolutely adore me.”

The tell-tale silence ends with Gillian’s softly grunted admission: “Maybe.”

Caroline grins.

“But you’re still a bitch.”


End file.
